The best PC gaming processor

A good gaming rig doesn't need the most expensive CPU.

Ahhh, smell the Coffee Lake. 2017 has delivered a bumper crop of new CPUs, and the last and final entrant is in many ways the best. If you're looking to build a new system for gaming purposes, these are the best processors right now. And if you want to do things besides gaming, we've got some recommendations for those users as well.

The CPU was once the most important component in your PC. It was responsible for nearly everything going on inside the big box sitting on your desk. These days, the CPU is still a critical component, but for gaming purposes nothing beats the graphics card. Meanwhile, the performance gap between the fastest and most expensive processors and those that are 'good enough' keeps shrinking, all while the pricing gap is increasing.

For PC gaming, this is actually great news. Most of us can get by just fine with a moderate processor. Core counts, cache sizes, and clock speeds continue to improve as the years roll by, but chances are if you have a desktop built any time in the past five years, it can play most games.

Today, the range of CPUs available from AMD and Intel is incredibly diverse. In 2017, AMD launched two new platforms, socket AM4 for Ryzen 7, Ryzen 5, and Ryzen 3, and socket TR4 for the mammoth Threadripper line. If anything, Intel has been even busier. After releasing Kaby Lake at the start of the year, Intel upgraded its enthusiast platform with X299 and LGA2066, for the Skylake-X CPUs including the 10-core i9-7900X and the 18-core i9-7980XE. But most gamers will be best served by the new Coffee Lake mainstream CPUs, the i7-8700K and the i5-8400.

Do you absolutely have to have one of the latest processors from either company? Of course not, and many gamers are still happily running CPUs that are several generations out of date. But for any new gaming PC build, there's little reason to buy older hardware, and we've updated our picks accordingly.

Remember that you don't have to buy the most expensive processor around to have a great gaming experience. Today's desktop processors can handle just about any game you throw at them, and many can be overclocked to improve performance (at the cost of increased power, heat, and potentially noise). We've researched and tested all the latest CPUs, along with looking at previous generations, and these are the ones worth putting in your next gaming rig (and a few additional thoughts for non-gaming purposes, naturally).

The best gaming processor

Six cores for even the most demanding PC games

Efficient and includes a heatsink

No overclocking potential

Lacks Hyper-Threading/SMT

It's easy to get caught lusting after the highest performing processors—who doesn't want an 18-core beast with quad-channel memory? The dirty little not-so-secret is that most high-end CPU features don't really do jack squat for the majority of games. Unless you're building a PC to also do things like video editing, image manipulation, software development, or creating an AI to take over the world, there's a very real chance that you'll be just fine with a far less costly CPU. That's where Intel's mainstream offerings excel, nowhere more so than in its new Core i5-8400 wunderkind.

Competition from AMD has forced Intel to step up its game, and with Ryzen delivering 6-core/12-thread parts for around $200, the old 4-core/4-thread Core i5 line needed a sharp kick in the ass. Enter Coffee Lake and the new Core i5, which still lacks Hyper-Threading but finally moves Intel's mainstream offerings beyond quad-core. The i5-8400 foregoes the unlocked multiplier but provides clockspeeds of 3.8-4.0GHz, and it includes everything you'll need (meaning, the CPU heatsink that the K-series processors typically omit). With 50 percent more cores than the previous generation i5 parts, more demanding games get a nice boost to performance. In fact, looking at our gaming test suite the i5-8400 manages to equal the earlier i7-7700K.

Specs

The Core i5-8400 may not have as many threads as AMD's Ryzen 5 parts, but it makes up for it with higher per-core performance. Intel CPUs continue to be the fastest option for gaming, thanks in part to better latency. Even Intel's latest Core i9 parts can't top the i5-8400, at least without overclocking. Unless you need every last bit of performance, there's no need to spring for the i7-8700K, at least not in today's games.

The only real downside to the i5-8400 is that it requires a new motherboard and chipset. Despite using the same socket LGA1151 as Kaby Lake and Skylake CPUs, Intel has tweaked the pinout for Coffee Lake for "power delivery purposes." Don't try putting a Kaby Lake chip into a Z370 motherboard, or it could kill the chip--and vice versa, so Coffee Lake won't run in Z270 boards. All indications are Intel made this change more to force a socket and platform upgrade rather than being absolutely required, but either way we're stuck with buying new motherboards this round.

But not everyone builds a PC purely for playing games. Do you want to edit video, livestream your gaming sessions, and become the next Twitch star? You can do all that just fine on the i5-8400, though the heaviest workloads can benefit from higher spec CPUs. If you're looking for something more robust, the i7-8700 costs about $100 more and enables Hyper-Threading, doubling the number of threads to 12. It also has higher clockspeeds, making overclocking almost unnecessary. If you're trying to decide between the i7-8700 and the unlocked i5-8600K, once you add in the cost of an aftermarket cooler, the price is about the same. Double the threads with the potential loss of 300MHz is a fair trade.

What about Ryzen?

The i5-8400 has claimed our pick for the best gaming processor, but it's not perfect. Arguably the only reason Intel came out with Coffee Lake was to clearly beat AMD on every level. Intel CPUs do tend to cost a bit more for the added performance, and if you already own an AMD Ryzen processor there's no need to feel bad. The Ryzen 5 1600 and Ryzen 7 1700 remain very capable CPUs, particularly outside of games. But for pure gaming performance, even without Hyper-Threading or an unlocked multiplier, the i5-8400 the way to go.

But AMD's AM4 platform does have at least one advantage, and it's that AMD is far more likely to support new CPUs on existing motherboards than Intel. Socket AM4 should see some new Ryzen 2 (or whatever AMD calls them) processors come 2018, and if AMD can improve clockspeeds and gaming performance those might end up back in the discussion. Intel may also launch 8-core/16-thread parts for Z370, though I wouldn't bet the farm on that.

The best budget gaming processor

Still games fine with moderate GPUs

Same platform as 7th Gen Intel i5/i7

No overclocking support or Turbo modes

Only dual-core, but Hyper-Threading helps

Can't upgrade to Coffee Lake without a new mobo

Suppose you're not planning on building the fastest gaming rig on the planet—you just want something that won't break the bank. Among other things, that means you're not likely to stuff in an expensive graphics card, which means gaming performance is limited by your GPU of choice. The good news is that not only can you save money, you don't even have to sacrifice all the modern features in the process—and power requirements can be quite a bit lower.

The Pentium G4560 remains our pick for the best budget gaming, mostly because nothing else comes close to its asking price. Sure, the new Core i3-8100 has four full cores, but it's $40 more, which could get a faster GPU instead. The same goes for the Ryzen 3 parts from AMD. If you're trying to pinch every penny, until the Coffee Lake Pentiums show up, the G4560 (or G4600, depending on current prices) is hard to pass up. Pair it with an inexpensive motherboard using a H110 or H270 chipset and you're set.

Specs

The Pentium G4560 isn't super fast, but it's still clocked at 3.5GHz, and it's the cheapest Intel CPU with Hyper-Threading around. You give up AVX instruction support, and a few other advanced features like Optane Memory, but those won't really affect gaming performance. With a GTX 1060 6GB, the G4560 is only 10 percent slower than an overclocked i7-5930K, a CPU that costs nearly ten times as much. Even with a GTX 1080 Ti, the G4560 is only 35 percent slower than the top-performing gaming CPU, the i7-8700K.

The Pentium G4560 can become a serious bottleneck in more demanding scenarios, and CPU-centric testing pegs the G4560 at roughly one sixth the performance of the i7-8700K. But if you're looking at a $100-$200 graphics card, saving money on your CPU to upgrade to a faster GPU is a good plan.

Think of this as the stepping stone for a gaming system. You can run any current game, and down the road you have the Core i5-7600K and Core i7-7700K as upgrade options. Sadly, the 6-core Coffee Lake CPUs won't work on Z270 motherboards, so i7-7700K remains the maximum future upgrade.

I tend to recommend around a 2:1 ratio on cost of GPU vs. CPU, meaning up to a GTX 1050 Ti or RX 560 would be a great pairing for a modest gaming solution. Performance is respectable for a sub-$100 part, and if you're doing a true budget build there's no need to put more money into your processor.

Since there's also no official support for overclocking, you can also look at motherboards with the H110/H170/H270 chipsets, and decent models start at not much more than $50/£50, with well-equipped ATX boards under $100/£100. Just keep in mind that if you plan on upgrading to a Core i5 or i7 part later, you might want to invest in a better motherboard.

The biggest concern with Intel's Pentium processors is future games that may start putting additional CPU cores to better use. Assassin's Creed: Origins will still run on the lowly chip for example, but even 30 fps will likely prove difficult in some areas.. But given the price, you're hardly breaking the piggy bank to buy the G4560.

Determining where to spend money on any new PC build is a balancing act between price, performance, power requirements, and features—and you can only choose two or three of those four areas. For high-end builds, cost is rarely in their favor. In the case of the i9-7900X, we're sacrificing price as well as power use in order to gain performance and features. But we're not going crazy here, so the i9-7980XE didn't make the cut.

The X299 platform is Intel's latest and greatest enthusiast offering, with current CPUs delivering up to 18-cores/36-threads, but those are definitely not intended for gamers (though if you have one, they'll work just fine). What X299 gives you that you won't get from Coffee Lake or Kaby Lake mostly comes down to more cores and PCIe lanes. The additional cores and PCIe lanes won't usually result in better gaming performance, though they can helps in a few select cases with SLI/CrossFire. But more importantly, there are plenty of non-gaming scenarios where the additional cores can really pay dividends.

Specs

Let's be clear and state that for single graphics card configurations used purely for gaming, there's little benefit to running a 10-core processor right now, or even an 8-core CPU. In fact, the 4-core i7-7700K follows close on the heels of the 6-core i7-8700K, claiming the two two spots in most of our CPU gaming results. And when you want to put away the games and edit a video, the 20 threads of 7900X will make short work of just about any task.

Choosing the best high-end processor, albeit with an eye toward gaming, can feel a bit overwhelming. Besides Intel's i7-8700K, which is certainly another good option, you have the previous generation X99 processors (i7-5820K, i7-5930K, i7-5960X, i7-6800K, i7-6850K, i7-6900K, and i7-6950X) which are still very capable. But if you're building a new rig, Skylake-X is the most effective way to move beyond Intel's 6-core offerings.

The i9-7900X delivers excellent gaming and non-gaming performance. For games, on average it's only a couple of percent behind the i7-8700K, and it's 15 percent ahead of the fastest Ryzen chip (Threadripper or otherwise). In CPU-centric testing, including heavily threaded workloads, Threadripper 1950X is 13 percent faster on average, and up to 45 percent faster in specific tests. But this is PC Gamer so we're biased toward gaming over non-gaming use.

Do you really need Core i9 for a high-end gaming PC?

Core i9 costs more than twice as much as the mainstream Core i7 parts like the 8700K. Is it really the best choice for extreme gaming PCs?

In terms of value, Core i9 absolutely falls short. The Core i7-8700K is generally the fastest processor for gaming purposes. There are a few games where the additional cores and threads help the i9 pull ahead, but most current games still won't tax much more than a 4-core/4-thread processor, let alone the 6-core/12-thread i7-8700K. But if you want a PC that can game and still have resources for other tasks available, or if you want a gaming PC you can also use for professional work, Core i9 makes sense.

Making a case for Threadripper

Not everyone feels games are the end-all, be-all of processor metrics, and rightly so. If you're more interested in video editing, CAD/CAM, or other professional workloads, AMD's Threadripper 1950X is a much better value than the i9-7900X at the same $1000 asking price. Even better, the mere existence of Ryzen 7 and Threadripper has forced Intel to be more aggressive in its pricing, with the 8-core i7-7820X going for $600 compared to the previous generation i7-6900K that cost $1000 or more, and the i9-7900X delivers 10-core for $1000 compared to $1650 or more for last year's i7-6950X. You can thank AMD for that.

Competition is good for the consumer and good for the industry. While Intel still wins in many raw performance metrics, AMD helps to keep Intel honest (or at least partially so). And what better way to support AMD's efforts than to buy its insane 16-core/32-thread Threadripper 1950X? It's the same price as the i9-7900X, and in most non-gaming tasks it will be the faster option. It will take Intel's $1700-$2000 Skylake-X parts before we see anything more potent on the market.

And as an added bonus, Threadripper is the largest consumer CPU package we've ever laid hands on. It's basically the size of a very small smartphone, only it can consume about 20 times more power. All Threadripper CPUs also provide 60 PCIe Gen3 lanes and are multiplier unlocked, though I wouldn't expect to get much beyond 3.8GHz on the 1950X unless you have some extreme liquid cooling available.

Multi-GPU considerations

For SLI and CrossFire performance, there's also a theoretical benefit to having dual x16 connections to your graphics card. However, looking at dual x8 connections with GTX 1080 Ti on a Z370 motherboard, it still tended to beat the Core i9 products in gaming performance in quite a few games. And really, SLI and CrossFire are well past their prime, with many new games that fail to support the technology. You can improve overall performance with dual x16 PCIe connections in a few specific games, but I'd stick with the fastest single GPU you can reasonably afford. Unless you have an extra $700 burning a hole in your wallet.

That means multiple test platforms, with the key components being the motherboard, memory, and graphics card. We standardized on Nvidia's GTX 1080 Ti FE as our graphics card, as it shows the largest difference in gaming performance you're likely to see with current generation GPUs. For memory, we've used high-end G.Skill TridentZ DDR4-3200 CL14 memory on all modern platforms, in either 2x8GB or 4x8GB configurations.

The motherboards used in testing include the MSI Z270X Gaming M7 for LGA1151, Asus X299-A Prime for LGA2066, and MSI X99A Gaming Pro Carbon for LGA2011-3 on the Intel side of things. For AMD platforms, we used the Gigabyte AX370-Gaming 5 for Ryzen, and the Asus Zenith Extreme for Threadripper. Liquid cooling was used on all CPUs.

Performance Results

You can see the details of the individual tests in our latest CPU reviews, the most recent of which is Intel's Core i5-8400. To keep things manageable for our buying guides, we've focused on the two summary charts, showing aggregate gaming performance and aggregate CPU performance. All of the results are for CPUs running at stock speeds, though we've also taken overclocked performance into account where applicable.

We measured performance in a variety of games using the GTX 1080 Ti. The current gaming suite consists of 16 games running at 1080p Ultra settings, with 4xMSAA where applicable and FXAA/SMAA otherwise. While 1080p isn't the most demanding resolution, we wanted to give the CPUs a bit of room to show their stuff—running at 1440p and 4K typically ends up testing GPU performance more than anything, and 1080p Ultra is a good compromise.

Besides gaming tests—because really, no PC is going to be purely for gaming—we also ran general system and processor performance. Our test suite includes Cinebench R15, x264 HD 5.0.1 (both passes), HwBot's x265 test, y-cruncher, PCMark 10, VeraCrypt, and 7-zip. Along with these benchmarks, we also use each processor as a 'normal' user, surfing the web, installing some applications, writing, etc. to see if there's anything else we notice that doesn't specifically show up in the benchmarks.

These charts show performance running 'clean' Windows 10 builds, with no other non-essential tasks gobbling up CPU time. What happens to gaming performance if you do other stuff? I actually tested this with Core i5-7600K in a moderately loaded configuration, with numerous browser tabs open, doing a GPU-assisted Twitch livestream, while viewing a different livestream on a secondary monitor, and with bunches of other utilities and applications running in the background. The result was that the i5-7600K gaming performance dropped by around 10 percent on average, or in other words, it was still faster than a clean Ryzen 5 1600X for gaming (though minimum fps was a bit worse).

Peering into our crystal ball

2017 has been the busiest year in history for CPU launches, and with Coffee Lake out the door it should finally be quieting down ... until AMD starts talking about Zen 2 early next year. It's worth reiterating that for gaming purposes, the CPU isn't going to need upgrading nearly as often as the graphics card, especially if you buy a higher spec processor to start with. When I looked at Nvidia's new GTX 1070 Ti, I tested it on both an overclocked i7-5930K and a stock i7-8700K. The results were basically a tie. So if you're not running an insane graphics card, keep that in mind. It's why the i5-8400 is the best current pick.

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